2016: Year of Sticking It to Teacher. Teacher had, it turned out, not been paying enough attention to just over half the class. Jimmy Gay’s memoir, Ho! Ho! Ho! A Poaching We Will Go! (2017) is in its way the best guide I know to what happened that year and is far from over now. Everything from the cheeky self-published format to its swaggering tone gives voice to the trouble we are in, better than a well-meaning treatise ever could.

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Some background. After the Second World War, the Canadian Government, seeking to increase revenue from its cod fishery, adopted a new management regime. To maximise yield and eliminate fluctuations in the catch, larger vessels began to fish further offshore all year round. The old seasonal inshore fishery, already in trouble, was dismantled. The changes were felt as far off as Bridport, Dorset, for centuries a supplier of fishing gear to the region. Nine-tenths of the cod-lines in use off Nova Scotia were still in the 1950s manufactured in the town. With larger boats now requiring larger nets, its factories struggled to adapt. One of them, for example, bought a special braiding machine for salmon nets. At one point it was working twenty-four hours a day just to fulfil orders from North America. Remember that: salmon nets.

As continental economies recovered from the war, Bridport’s large, older factories fell idle during the 1960s. The loss of imperial markets, advances in automation elsewhere and the introduction of synthetic fibres had already undermined their position. Net-makers continued – and continue – ...